AMIGO

A moving and revealing novel that delves into the strength of friendship, betrayal, and the ways chance and history force us to reflect on life.

Inés Sánchez Cruz, a Mexican poet working as a Creative Writing professor at the University of Wisconsin, arrives to Madrid. There she will give a poetry workshop and investigate a recent discovery: the family archive of Joaquín Amigo, a friend of García Lorca, who was taken away and violently murdered at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Inés is in a deep rut for reasons that seem linked to academic power struggles and professional disappointments in recent years. The death of a close friend in the department unearths a series of traumatic memories that intermingle with the documents she is researching and the letters she finds in the family archive. A fascinating story blending fiction and reality with an examination of one of the least-known figures of the Generation of '27 and the author's own documentary discoveries. Ana Merino (Madrid 1971) is a professor and founder of the MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Iowa. She has published nine collections of poems, including Preparativos para un viaje, winner of the 1994 Adonáis Poetry Prize, and is the author of plays premiered in Zurich and Iowa. An expert in cultural studies, she is a pioneer, with her essays, in the development of academic training in comics. She has been a columnist for El País, a member of the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF), the Board of Directors of the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) and the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Riverside Theatre of Iowa. She was awarded the 2020 Nadal Prize for her first novel, El mapa de los afectos. Amigo is her second fiction novel.